COMMERCE CITY — Nearly 40 percent of Colorado’s high school class of 2011 needed remedial courses in at least one subject before beginning college-level work, down from 41.4 percent the year before, according to a report released Tuesday by the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

“It’s a concern to hear that anyone needs to take a remedial course — and it ought to be for everyone in the state,” Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia said. “We need to save students time and want the state to save money.”

According to Garcia, Colorado’s remediation rate was about on par with most of the country. The difference between here and other states, he said, are the things being done to lower the remediation rate, which leads to higher graduation rates.

These initiatives include concurrent enrollment, in which students take college remedial courses while still in high school, as well as the GEAR UP, a federally-funded program in which middle school students complete remedial classes through a partnership with Adams State University. They then begin to take college courses in their sophomore year of high school.

According to the 2012 Remedial Education Report, released at Kearney Middle School in Commerce City, 66 percent of students who enrolled in community colleges and 24 percent of those attending four-year institutions needed some sort of remedial course. Among them, 51 percent required remediation in mathematics, 31 percent in writing and 18 percent in reading.

The report is based only on students who enrolled in public Colorado colleges and universities in the 2011-12 school year, the most recent data available.

African-American students had the highest remediation rates — 90 percent among students in two-year schools and 56 percent at four-year schools. About 78 percent of Hispanic students at two-year schools needed remediation, compared with 40 percent at four-year colleges. Among white students, 57 percent at community colleges needed remediation, compared with 19 percent at four-year schools.

According to the report, among public schools, D’Evelyn High School had the lowest number of graduates requiring remediation courses at 2.2 percent, compared with 95 percent of graduates from Emily Griffith Opportunity School.

Colleges usually don’t give credits for the remedial courses that must be taken before the students begin their collegiate careers, which means that it often takes more time to complete degree work. Also, the responsibility for paying for remedial course work often falls to student, their families and the state.

In 2011-12, the higher education department said the estimated total cost associated with remedial courses was about $58 million, with students paying about $39 million of that.

Garcia said lowing the remediation rate would help raise retention rates at colleges and universities. That, in turn, would increase graduation rates.

One of the goals of the Master Plan that was recently implemented by the state calls for graduation rates to increase by 1,000 students a year for the next 12 years.

Spain came under repeated attack starting Thursday in what authorities called linked terrorist incidents, when a driver swerved a van into crowds in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district, killing more than a dozen people and injuring scores of others. Early Friday, an attempted attack unfolded in a town down the coast

If there’s one superhero character whose rise might be most tied to the events of World War II, it is Captain America, who emerged from the minds of legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and sprung forth from an iconic 1941 debut cover on which Cap smacks Hitler right in the kisser.

A customer dining at Washington’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.”